Better You Go Home
Page 28
“Is it true what my mother has told to me?” Anežka says to František. “You never send for me?” When he offers nothing in his defense, she adds, “Please sign papers. Let us be done.”
“I am old now,” Rosalie says. “When I was young and beautiful, I was every man’s desire. This is also truth. I had no home.”
“Glory!” shouts Jungmann. “Truth prevails! Now untie me and we will finish.”
Ignoring him, she says to Anežka, “You hear me? I had no home.”
Anežka’s eyes are dark and hollow. “You believe I will have sympathy for you?”
Rosalie asks my father to hand her the nearest lantern. The lantern’s light flickers over the papers. Rosalie hurriedly signs where Halbrstat indicates she should sign and then she instructs my father to sign. I expect him to hesitate, to at least give me a look that says it pains him to do this, but no. He signs. She instructs Halbrstat to cut short the ceremony and skip straight to the vows. In a matter of minutes the deed is done.
“Now you can be happy,” she says to Jungmann. “I am your wife.”
“One thing you have forgotten,” he says. “Untie me.”
“I like you better this way.”
He grabs the lantern from her hand. With a sweep of his lashed arms he knocks the papers out of Halbrstat’s grasp. The papers scatter on the altar. He throws the lantern. The glass shatters. Kerosene spills. Very quickly the papers are burning.
“Go. Have him. But you will have nothing from me.”
He looks to Anežka. “I have signed release with court.” Like the rest of us she is frozen by the suddenness of the flames. “You are free to go. Get out of here.”
“I loved you,” Rosalie says to my father. “I loved you so much. I could not understand why you would leave.” Flames flick up the posts holding the swing.
“Jestli chceš umřít, tak si klidně umři, ale já u toho nebudu. Listen to me!” Anežka is screaming. “If you want to die, mother, you can peacefully die, but I’m not going to be by it!”
There is nothing heroic, nothing elevating in raw pain. Jungmann’s eyes open wide, black lips part. He says to Rosalie, “Go. Get out of here.”
My father lets himself down from the burning platform. “Come on,” he says.
Rosalie laughs. “Don’t worry, it is only game we like to play. Isn’t it my love? Our little fire game.”
The hall is filling with smoke and running low on oxygen. The urge to suck cool air into the lungs is as instinctual as the urge to save yourself when drowning.
* * *
Outside, the frozen hayfield and snowy yard are lit up like a sports arena. Men wearing heavy black coats and silver helmets, on their arms official looking royal blue patches with yellow trim, rush toward the entrance bearing axes and sledgehammers. Hurry along, we are told. My father shouts at them that there are still people inside. We continue until we are a safe distance away in the snowy cornfield.
Chapter Thirty-Four
On the Wedding Night the Orphanage Burns
The WWII vintage red and white TATRA fire truck, hood rounded like a roadster’s, doesn’t inspire confidence. Its lone water cannon, mounted atop the cab, won’t do much to stop the fire. Our footfalls crossing the frozen field are muted by the snow. At a safe distance, we stop among corn sheaves to catch our breath. We look back. Men in black coats have battered down the door. No one is going in. Nor is anyone approaching us for questioning about the fire. It’s obvious that someone phoned ahead to the fire service.
You smell it as much as see it, an oily smell of creosote. You hear a whipping sound like curtains snapping. You imagine the heat before you feel it. The night air is thickening with a column of black smoke. The hole in the roof draws the flames up like a chimney flue. The outer walls resist the burn. The ark is enduring even this storm. There is still time to go in.
Anežka cannot tear her eyes away from the spectacle of her home burning. “Who called 1-5-0? They are pathetic volunteers. They will only watch.”
“My bet is Jungmann.” That outburst we just witnessed? He never intended to turn the orphanage over to Anežka. What he hadn’t counted on was Rosalie refusing to leave. Is this her final test? That last look he gave her, that was pure desperation. Did he want her to leave with my father? Was this his way of freeing her?
My father rubs his arthritic knees. “Anyone see them come out?”
Anežka is without her cane. She seems to have lost it. Silhouetted against the flames licking along the canted roof, she stands with her back to me. I can’t see her expression, but I can guess by the way she leans into the heat that she’s planning something. A van with a strobing blue light pulls up. Two men jump out and begin donning gear.
In the melee, the smoke, the men in black, the barricades, the strobing lights, the uncertain radiation of flames playing hide and seek, now here, now gone, it is impossible to know whether those two have got out.
“She did not untie his arms,” Anežka muses. “Some clients like hanging torture. You hang from hook with rope tied around wrists. Your lungs weaken. When you drop you feel intense pleasure of relief.”
“Keep this to yourself if we’re questioned. You are not there. We don’t know what’s going on in there.”
“She will make him pay for burning my home. She will say she do it for me.”
“There’s nothing we can do. The firemen will get them out.”
“She always want to be martyr. She say she sacrifice her life for me. I cannot allow her to believe this lie.” She takes off running across the frozen field. Without her cane, her hips lurch and her shoulders dip and rise like a pump. She pushes through the maw of warbling sirens and strobing blue lights. I shout at her to stop. The fire sizzles like a waterfall. It’s unlikely she hears. I start after her. The frozen furrows are unforgiving and my feet are wooden blocks. I trip before I’ve covered more than a few yards. It’s all I can do to hoist myself up. I couldn’t save my own child if I had to. My father helps me stand upright, holds me.
“Ty si skutečně myslíš, že budu sedět s rukama v klíně a dívat se jak umírás? You really think I will sit calmly on my hands and watch you die?” He is so agitated his English has slipped. He is furious. Tears are in his eyes. He might have made this mistake once but he’s not going to make it again. That is his daughter but I am the son he knows. He has made his choice. He holds me. He won’t let me run after her. I don’t have the strength to resist.
Men in black coats shout at her, but she has already run past them. The newest arrivals continue their ritual of suiting up in yellow flame-retardant gear and slinging on air tanks and blowing out tubes and adjusting mask straps. Their prep has probably taken no more than a minute or so, but they arrived on the scene late and that delay may mean the difference between life and death.
I see her cane in the snow. I pick it up. It feels like cherry wood and has a bend, probably from a limb taken out of the orchard behind the orphanage. An insignia is carved into the wood. It looks like a bison, though in this uncertain light it’s hard to be sure. “Anežka, wait.” I have entirely misunderstood her intentions. That man in there, for all his cruelty, is the only father who never abandoned her. “You will need this.”
Using her cane this time, I manage to hobble across the field toward the burning building, without going down. Heat rolls over me in waves. Cold sears my back. The loft has captured an angry beast of yellow flame. Smoke eddies, little puffs of vengeful breath, dance along the roofline.
A stern voice broadcast from a megaphone orders me to back away. The crackling is intensely loud. The last gargoyle tumbles. The Tatra’s water cannon ejaculates a pathetic stream that splashes over the stone foundation. The choice seems to have been made to let the flames consume the orphanage.
Men in black coats block my progress. “Let me through.” I shove. My pulse hammers in my ears. They shove back. “She needs her cane. You don’t understand.”
But then I see I’m too late.
“I am her brother.” I place her cane on the stretcher beside her. My eyes are watering from the smoke. “See you in Prague,” I say. Her expression is unreadable under that mask. Her eyes are closed. I imagine she is calmly sleeping. At last, warm, deep, comforting sleep. “Stay with me, Anežka. I’ll wait for you in Prague.”
No one notices the cane. It goes into the back of the wagon with her. The doors are closed, the siren turned on. “Have a good sleep,” I whisper. “I’ll be there when you wake up.” The aid wagon screams away. I glance back at the orphanage. That tongue of fire is still lolling along the roof edge as though making up its mind whether to consume this feast or not. The walls are still intact. “It could still be saved,” I say to my father, who has come up beside me. The amber of the flames is beautiful. The world has just hardened into the destructive beauty of this semi-precious gem of amber.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Prague: Early Tuesday Morning, End of October, 1994
In the frigid hour before dawn a crack like fracturing bones wakes me from sleep. I climb out of bed and go to the window. Several inches of fresh snow have collected during the night. The gnarled plum tree leaning over the bench where my father liked to sit has just shattered under the load. Its splintered trunk juts grotesquely skyward. The crash woke my father as well. He enters my room, sits in the moonlight on the edge of my bed. It disturbs me to think of that amputated trunk abandoned in the snow and I tell him so. He promises that when he’s home from the hospital, he’ll saw it into splits. Yveta’s house no longer has wood-burning stoves so he’ll have the splits hauled out to the farm.
“We still have an hour,” he says. “Better get some rest.”
“Sing ‘Clementine’ for me,” I say. “All the verses you know.” I reclaim my bed and close my eyes but my thoughts keep churning over what happened.
* * *
No one, with the possible exception of Anežka, was with Rosalie and Jungmann in their last moments. What happened is a matter of speculation. Maybe, like Anežka said, her mother had a martyr complex. When Anežka ran back into the building, it was him she intended to save. I’m convinced of this and I told my father as much. In a fire of this size, an odorless gas layer hovers above waist level, replacing breathable oxygen with toxins. Disoriented by the smoke and gas, she couldn’t remember where she’d entered. Asphyxiation by gas is said to affect its victims like severe dehydration. Your capacity to reason deserts you. You can’t think how to save yourself.
The ambulance delivered Aneža to Prague. When exactly she died is not clear, but her organs were harvested and delivered to IKEM. We have twenty-four hours to transplant the kidney and pancreas. Milada is the on-call anesthesiologist.
After arriving late in Prague—we were driven in that rattling Volga and somehow I managed to sleep through most of it—we got the call from IKEM. I asked my father to follow me into my room to talk. His eyes had a hollow, scoured look and his mouth hung open in a bewildered oval. Even when Mom died I saw nothing like this. “Why?” he said. “Why did it have to end this way?” Every time I tried to push my thoughts toward the hard truth that my sister was dead, they short-circuited to the shock of guilt: I should have somehow stopped her from running back in there. I could have stopped her. If that’s what I had really intended I could have found a way. I was at a crux point. No different than Isis at the lip of his cage. Like my father watching Jungmann with Leoš, I watched her go, and I did nothing. To console me, my father sang, low so he wouldn’t disturb Josef in the next room, “In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine, was a miner forty-niner and his daughter ...” It was too irretrievable. I burst into tears.
* * *
Then we slept. The storm dumped snow, the old plum shattered, the storm passed. Moonlight now illuminates a silvery patch on my desk below the window. My Steno—I’d tried earlier to jot notes about what happened but didn’t get far—is laid open in that patch of silver.
He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Why did you try to run back in? What were you thinking? You could have died.”
“I kept thinking she needed her cane. It had a bison on it. I realized it must have been a gift from Jungmann. I knew she’d want it.”
There’s a tap at my door. When Milada got the call at the hospital earlier she’d called here. She wanted to talk to me before the surgery. She must have let herself in downstairs with her own key.
Under her coat she’s already dressed in her green scrubs. My father leaves the room so the two of us can talk. She sits on my hard box bed.
“Chico.” When Milada starts this way I can be sure I won’t like what follows. “I am wondering what is right thing to do. You should rest for surgery. Is better for recovery.” Her cold hand strokes my overheated brow and I welcome it. “But it seemed wrong that you will expect something that cannot happen.”
“Come on, Milada. I was never expecting miracles.”
“Dost, Chico. You are naïve.” She bends. I smell snow on her and she kisses my forehead. “You still have American belief that everything can be fixed.”
“You love me anyway, don’t you?”
“Ano, Chico. Ano ano ano. Too much I still love you. If I did not love you this would be easier.”
“What would be easier?”
“Listen to me. Please.
No more of your million questions. Okay?” She squeezes my cheeks. I attempt to nod. “Okay?” I nod more or less. “Maybe I am naïve like you. All my life I dreamed of escape to America. Last night when I came home, I realized I would be too sad to live away from my sons. My youngest, Martin. Seattle? Grunge? He would be happy. But, my oldest, he is music editor. His passion is Czech folk songs. My second son is studying journalism. He want to write about politics. Both are infected with nationalism like their father. I have thought, okay, they are grown, they don’t need mother. But last night we have dinner together. We act like family again.”
She presses her cold hand to my cheek. “What is to become of us? You will be expected to stay here for one year after surgery for care. It will be impossible that we will not see each other. What will we do?”
“For one year more you will be mine.”
“Chico, no, it is too hard. No.”
“I have to do something for Anežka.”
“She wished for you to have kidney.”
“I let her die. I let her run in there. I could have stopped her.”
“She choose this. If what you have say to me is true.”
“What is truth? You should have seen my father’s face when we heard Anežka didn’t make it. It really shook him. Finally he had his chance to try and make it up to her. Then just like that. Snatched away.”
“Peel away American skin and you will find deep deep loyalty to family.”
“What does this do to your human rights case?”
She laughs. “Do not worry, there are many torturers.” She touches my lips to shush me. She kisses my forehead again. I want to hold her. She senses that and leaves me looking after her. Her slippered feet pad cautiously down the spiral staircase. Must be entertaining doubts. Not enough evidently to turn her around.
* * *
Instead of closing my eyes, I go to my desk at the window. In the moonlit garden, snow robes the statue of the boy holding his penis. The corpse of the old plum reminds me of the pheasant my father shot down. Crack, boom. I write in my Steno:
Anežka ran across the field without her cane. Her arms swung crazily as if she were in the race of her life. Well, I guess she was, you would have to say. Why did I hesitate?
From below I hear the first st
irring in Yveta’s household. Not sleeping well because of the chemo, she is prone to be up well before her boys, puttering in her kitchen. Even the smell of food, she’s admitted, makes her want to throw up.
Really, all I could think was, she needs her cane. In that moment it was everything. She needs her cane. That’s what I remember thinking while I stood in that field and watched her run toward the fire. But, am I being honest with myself? Wasn’t there a part of me that wanted to save her for purely selfish reasons? I can’t stop replaying that image, her hips swinging, her arms pumping. In a weird way, it was a beautiful moment. For the only time in my life I saw someone commit their very existence to something they desired. I admired her for that. I envied her. All that desire. And she was so close, so close.
* * *
In a few minutes we leave for the hospital. Not wanting to rely on a taxi, Milada has returned. I’ve packed a travel bag and included my insulin kit and spare testing strips. It will take a week or so before Anežka’s pancreas will kick in. Rifling through the armoire, looking for something personal to put in my bag, though I told him it would probably be taken away at the hospital, my father pulls out the amber vase. Before driving back to Prague, we’d stopped by the hotel to clear out my things.
“It’s really beautiful.” He hoists the nearly solid blown glass vase and examines it. The light cannot pass through. The darkened amber turns the tea-color of swamp water teeming with subsurface life.
“It has flaws, but I thought that would make you like it all the more.”
“You might want something in your room to hold flowers.” He sits beside me on the bed and asks if he can hold my hand. He takes my hand without waiting for a reply. His hand is shaky, rough with calluses, but warm and reassuringly strong.
Milada sends Josef down to wait with the car and keep it running so the windows won’t ice over. She sits on my bed beside my father. He offers to rub my ankles but I decline. Ever since the beating at the prison, the swelling has not gone down. The lightest touch is painful. I can’t even wear socks unless they’re loose.